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We don’t shut-down and restart our computers very often. The longer you leave it on, the more seems to be wrong with it. Video playback problems, Internet Explorer not responding, blank pop-ins / pop-overs, otherwise totally annoying “movie ads” play just fine then a message that “your video” could not play (helpful message that says ERROR and nothing else) or that “Your browser does not support…” Windows 7, 64-Bit, Internet Explorer (IE) 11, Adobe Flash Player something-or-other (it seems there’s a new one every minute). Continue reading →

You’re a bad bot. I’m tired of playing with you. I’m going to make you dead now.

July, 2014. The internet is a secluded village, all controlled and terrorized by one boy…

Meet Anthony, from the ‘It’s a Good Life’ episode of The Twilight Zone (Nov. 1961). Details over at imdb, or watch the whole episode (with modernized commercial/ad inserts) at hulu.

We’ve hired Anthony, now in his 50s to do away with spam, Zombie DNS DDoS Bots, and other such pests buzzing around and annoying or destroying everything and everyone in the internet play ground. We should have thought of it earlier… Just making bad things dead or wishing them into the cornfield.

OK, not quite that easy, here’s what’s up in the fight against Spam-Nados and Zombie Bots…

We have had to turn back on/up as many of the filters and blocks as possible because the “spam load” on some of the users (including the admin) is overwhelming.

Some of your contacts may get ‘rejections’ or ‘bounces’ if their servers are identified as “blacklisted” (DNSBL). If you have any reports from your friends about problems email support@computermedic.org and we’ll get them whitelisted.

It reminds me of a level of Serious Sam – the one where 1,000s of those headless bomb-toting zombie-soldiers and screamers came pouring at you relentlessly, seemingly to infinity (and beyond).

It was a backdraft. Or the eye of the Zombie-Nado-Cane. When the bad-bots got some air around August 5th – hak4umz.net DDoS or DNS Amplification – fail2ban (and the servers) got burned.

Even the “eye-dee-keff-kuh-may” (TammyBelle’s God Mode Code for DOOM][ ) cheat didn’t help. fail2ban got clobbered… ‘already banned’ every one second in the log and no more bans happening because 100s or 1000s of times per second from 100s or thousands of bots: bad requests.